The optimism of curiosity

A famous son of Glasgow, Edwin Morgan belonged to all the nation, writes Liz Lochhead

There is a famous 1980 painting by Sandy Moffat called Poets’ Pub. This composite portrait, set in an amalgam of a few favourite Edinburgh haunts and howffs, came from separate preparatory studies made of the major Scottish poets in the late 1970s. Ranged around the central figure of Hugh Macdiarmid holding court are Norman Maccaig, Sorley Maclean, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Robert Garioch, Alan Bold and Edwin Morgan.

In reality, though, I can’t see Morgan fitting in to this gathering – not the pubbable or clubbable type. While on friendly terms with all of these near-contemporaries, after sharing a platform at a public reading he’d much more likely have been on the second-last train home to Glasgow than wreathed in argument, feuds and flytings, nips of whisky and a masculine fug of tweedy pipe smoke in the Abbotsford, Milne’s Bar or the Café Royal. In this painting Morgan isn’t part of the central group but off to the side, his gaze looking outward, elsewhere. As a Scottish poet, eccentric – but major.

The title of one of his best collections, From Glasgow to Saturn, just about delineates the range of his subject matter. At odds with the values of – although, as an only son, dutifully bound to – his douce, conservative, Protestant, prosperous parents, in his early poetry he struggled towards the freedom and release he found, when at the age of 40 in 1960 he moved out to the other side of the city and came into his own, both falling in love and finding his voice, which was many voices.

A Second Life (1968) proved him a virtuoso of nearly every form going. Almost to the very end of his long life he’d write everything from free verse to sonnets, concrete poems, sound poems, demotic dialogues, dramatic monologues – sometimes in the voice of the non-human something that did not have a voice till his listening imagination found it.

Morgan was a shape-shifter and a time-traveller. He translated Beowulf. He was modernist, European, experimental always. Yet he credits the Beats and other American poets of the middle of last century with granting him the exhilarating permission that poetry could be about anything.

Many of his poems are “about” Scotland though. Morgan was made Scotland’s first Makar (or national poet) of modern times in 2004 at the age of 84, just in time to write the poem to be read at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in its new building that year. Taking his cue from “the auld makars who tickled a Scottish king’s ear with melody and ribaldry and frank advice,” he dished out his own truth to the new Parliamentarians – who had “not wholly the power, not yet wholly the power” – insisting that when this poem was read out much emphasis had to be given to the “not yet.”

In “Aberdeen Train,” a moment’s glimpse from the window of an intercity express inspires a lyric of merely 11 lines that’s as vividly visually realised as a perfect Chinese landscape. Equally clear-eyed, all the more moving for the restraint of its stark documentary realism, “Death in Duke Street” faces the harshest of facts with the deepest humanity.

Memorably it was said of Morgan that he was fuelled by “the intrinsic optimism of curiosity.” In his poetry hope and realism are not at odds. There’s no denial of misery, violence, pain, but they are never given the last word. There is blistering anger in “Glasgow Sonnet V” and “The Flowers of Scotland.” But to enjoy his playful, deeply creative, always inventive twisting of language and sound, try saying aloud the dialogues “Canedolia” (a brilliant play on Scottish place-names) or “Itinerary.”

As well as profoundly serious, he was always great fun. I can still see him on his 89th birthday when he

was brought over to the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh for the opening of the Edwin Morgan Archive. Crisply elegant linen blazer, pale lemon yellow, under it a mockwarhol, nod-to-pop-art T-shirt with a metallic gold, silver and red striped appliqué of an iconic Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer. But when one looked closer, the name emblazoned there was Glasgow.

Edwin Morgan was indeed Glasgow’s own. He doesn’t belong to Glasgow though, but to all of Scotland in all times, to Europe, to the whole world, to poetry itself and, above all, to the transcendent, transforming power of imagination. ■